Web services offer the dual promise of simplicity and pervasiveness. Web services represent the next level of function and efficiency in e-business. A Web service can be viewed as any mechanism by which an application or data processing service can be provided to other applications on the Internet.
Web services may be informational or transactional. That is, some services provide information of interest to the requester while other services may actually lead to the invocation of business procedures. Examples of Web services include stock quote services, services to retrieve news from Web news sources, currency conversion services, etc. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,604,135, issued to Rogers et al. on Aug. 5, 2003, discloses a method and system for location based Web services.
Various approaches for implementing Web services are known, such as described in U.S. Patent Publication Nos. 2003/0093436A1, 2003/0055868A1, 2003/0055624A1, 2003/0018661A1, 2003/0110242A1, 2003/0163513A1, 2004/0064503A1, 2004/0045005A1, 2004/0003130A1, and 2003/0187841A1.
Some types of Web services are responsive to simple object access protocol (SOAP) messages. SOAP is an application invocation protocol that defines a protocol for exchanging information encoded as XML messages. Normally, these services are described by WSDL (Web Service Description Language) notation stored in WSDL documents. A WSDL document can be stored in numerous ways such as in a file, in a DB2 XML registry/repository, or in a DB2 based UDDI registry, for example. UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, Integration) is a protocol for describing Web services such that interested parties may easily discover them. Service providers may register their services in a UDDI, specifying technical information about how to invoke the service. Often, a WSDL document is stored in a UDDI registry in order to define the messages a particular Web services accepts and generates.
The design of UDDI allows enterprises that own Web service enabled applications to publish data about themselves and their services. By providing this information, UDDI implements a simplified form of searching for those interested in locating a particular service in which to fulfill an application process. The conventional UDDI search is focused on single search criteria such as business name, business location, business categories, business identifier, service type by name, and discovery URL (Uniform Resource Locator).